Nicholas Coleridge has been in charge of Condé Nast for 14 years, overseeing a publishing empire that includes Vogue, Glamour, Tatler, GQ and its most recent launch, Easy Living.

The old Etonian has spent much of the past year preparing for the launch of launch of some of the Condé Nast stable in India, a part of the world Coleridge knows all about. His father was born in Bombay and he proposed to his wife in Calcutta.

Easy Living, aimed at women over 30 and launched last year at a cost of £17m, increased its circulation by 6.5% in the second half of 2005 to 182,146, but is still falling short of Coleridge's 200,000 target.

Coleridge joined Condé Nast in 1989 after a three-year stint at Harpers & Queen, and became managing editor three years later.

The Condé Nast stable also includes the New Yorker and Wired in the US, Vanity Fair and Condé Nast Traveller. Glamour, which revolutionised the glossy market with its handbag format, is Britain's biggest selling fashion monthly, with sales of nearly 600,000 copies a month.

Coleridge began his career as a journalist at the Falmouth Packet in Cornwall, and became associate editor of Tatler aged just 22 under its then editor, Tina Brown.

As a columnist on the London Evening Standard he was named young journalist of the year at the British Press Awards in 1984, and nearly two decades later won the Mark Boxer Lifetime Achievement Award for magazine journalism.

Fond of a discreet - and occasionally not so discreet - dig at his rivals, Coleridge described She and Reveal publisher NatMags as a "bit of an echo machine, a poor man's Condé Nast and people who work there realise that."

Coleridge has also been dubbed London's most invited man, with a record of eight cocktail parties in one night. Not that he goes to many of them, preferring to spend time with his four children instead.

A prolific writer, Coleridge's 11th book, A Much Married Man, was described by one critic as a "crazy, semi-slapstick account of the Engilsh ruling classes over the last 40 years", with echoes of Iris Murdoch and Kazuo Ishiguro. Praise indeed. Imagine if he did it full-time.

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